1909The Midnight Sons, with a score by Raymond Hubbell and a book by Glen MacDonough, will run at the Broadway Theatre for nearly eight months. A highlight of the cast is dancer Vernon Castle. Director Ned Wayburn opens the show with an audience on stage watching the real audience.

1909J. J. Shubert tells the NY Dramatic Mirror that the Shubert organization is now in a position to play 40 weeks, coast-to-coast, owing to the theatres they own outright or control. In the coming season the Shuberts will control 100 attractions.

1920 American playwright Hal Reid died today at the age of 60. Among his plays are From Broadway to Bowery and The Kentuckian. In 1912 he was appointed censor to the Universal Film Corporation.

1967 American poet and playwright Langston Hughes died in New York City. He wrote two full-length plays, Mulatto, which was turned into a musical titled The Barrier in 1950, and Troubled Island. His autobiography, "The Big Sea" was published in 1940. He was 65 years old.

1998Jackie Mason, who has brought several stand-up shows to Broadway, gears up for his new work Much Ado About Everything at New York's Catch A Rising Star starting tonight. The show will reach The Great White Way's John Golden Theatre Dec. 30, 1999 and run 182 performances before closing July 30, 2000.

2011Joseph Brooks, the Hollywood composer of "You Light Up My Life" and the musicals In My Life and Metropolis, commits suicide in his Upper East Side apartment at age 73.

2012February House, Gabriel Kahane and Seth Bockley's musical that centers around the bohemian residents of the Brooklyn Heights address of 7 Middagh Street, opens Off-Broadway at the Public Theater. The production stars Julian Fleisher as George Davis, Stanley Bahorek as Benjamin Britten, Kacie Sheik as Gypsy Rose Lee, Erik Lochtefeld as W.H. Auden and Kristen Sieh as Carson McCullers.